Posts from March 2019

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Google’s Science Journal app enables you to use the sensors in your mobile devices to perform science experiments. We believe anyone can be a scientist anywhere. Science doesn’t just happen in the classroom or lab—tools like Science Journal let you see how the world works with just your phone. From learning about sound and motion to discovering how atmospheric pressure works, Science Journal helps you understand and measure the world around you.

We’re extremely excited to announce that we’re open sourcing this powerful science tool. We know the heart of science is not just critical thinking, but also knowledge sharing, building on discoveries, and learning about the world. Have a student with a knack for building things? Do you want to learn how mobile applications are put together? Download our source code, make changes and discoveries, and then deploy the newly-modified app to your own iOS device.

Why open source?

Inquiring minds are always asking, “How does this work?” With our open source app, there are many science and engineering topics to explore! For example, we use the Fast Fourier transform in our iOS code, but you may ask “how did you do that?” Because you can see our source code, you can discover-- not just that we used the Fast Fourier transform-- but how the algorithm works. We also make it possible to graph many sensor values in realtime and now you can see exactly how we’ve made that possible.

If you aren’t an iOS or Android engineer, don’t fret! You can even learn how apps are put together so you can build your own. Learning from, and making modifications to, open source code has helped countless Google engineers explore complicated topics and learn new skills.

Have you ever wished you could do something with Science Journal that it doesn’t currently do? Do you have an idea for building a new sensor and displaying its data in Science Journal? Maybe you’ve wanted to experiment with changing colors or fonts in the app, or even changing the Science Journal app icon to be a labrador with a lab coat? Now you can, by forking our repo, making changes, and committing them in your fork!

If you think your changes are amazing and should be included in Google’s Science Journal App, read our contribution guide. But if you want to keep your changes to yourself and your friends, well, that’s cool too! We’d love to see what you’ve built, so you can tweet at us @GScienceJournal, or just use the #myScienceJournal hashtag on Twitter.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

This week we join free and open source software communities around the world in celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It’s a huge milestone, and as we reflect on it we know there’s a lot to be grateful for.Google makes extensive use of Apache projects, contribute our own, and most of our open source projects are released under an Apache 2 license. Our community of Googlers decided to mark 20 years of The Apache Way by sharing their thoughts about ASF…… and we can hardly think of a more fitting way than to do that in the style of a mailing list thread:

FWD: [Discuss] 20 years of The Apache Way

When we think about the early days of the Internet one of the first names that comes to mind is the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and its contributions to Open Source! In fact, as I was recently told by a friend in the community, whenever she hears “Apache”, in a technology context, she automatically thinks about the Internet. I was in awe of her testament!

Here are the things I’d love to raise my glass to:

The Apache Way, for Being an Impressive Model for Collaborative Development
Technology as we know it wouldn’t be possible without the outstanding contributions of volunteers from all over the world, who under the umbrella of “The Apache Way,” have developed and maintained some of the most sophisticated software over the years.

When I joined Apache Beam, just a few months after its graduation as a top-level project, I realized how much work could be accomplished by the collaborative culture and the consensus driven decision making fostered by the ASF. Sure, sometimes things might drag a little behind the release schedule. But looking at the big picture, the developments that occurred in the last 20 years have significantly changed and enhanced our lives as they became the backbone and remain at the forefront of technology innovation.

The Community > Code
The Apache model recognizes contributors that help a project thrive, not only with code but also with contributions in project advocacy, documentation and community management. When I became the second non-code committer to Apache Beam, I realized how lucky I was to be part of a project that recognizes contributions of all type. I felt empowered and even more committed to the project. I’m passionate about building communities in open source, which aim to better the world, and I am committed to fostering a positive, diverse culture in which all ideas and perspectives are welcome and all members of the community have an equal opportunity to influence the technology.

The Apache Way model positions the community at the center of a project, caring for the individuals, their rights and responsibilities. People participate based on their merit and not based on any external affiliation, title, or education.

Ever since, my mission has been to act as an ambassador for Apache projects at Google and to increase our contributions to Apache projects.

I hope you all join us, sharing stories and taking a moment to be grateful for what 20 years of strong open source practices have brought to the world.

What a great occasion to celebrate! 20 years is no easy feat, and as the Apache Way has taught us, something like this can only be accomplished through enabling communities to grow healthily.

I want to raise my glass to the many ways in which the Apache Way has been implemented across all of the Apache projects. As I’ve been becoming familiar with different communities, I’ve observed how each one is different. Some of them are young and full of energy. Others are older and wiser. They have all adopted the Apache Way, and implemented it in ways that suit them. This has let them build vibrant and diverse communities, attract new users and contributors, and help them mature into full citizens of their projects.

As a new contributor, seeing these different communities thrive fills me with hope that 20 years is just the beginning, and we will see many more years of exciting projects and communities coming from the ASF.

I would like to invite you all to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation on March 26th!

To acknowledge this historic moment, I would like to start a [Discuss] thread so everyone can share Apache related milestones and memories they would like to celebrate with our vibrant community!

Apache Software is so ubiquitous that I believe it is safe to say that the ASF can be hailed as one of the most successful influencers in Open Source and I feel very grateful for being part of this vibrant community.

I would like to start by raising my glass to the organization of the Beam Summits 2019! It is an absolute pleasure being part of the team that is behind the scenes, pulling these events together to ensure we provide new and advanced contributors with the best tools and resources to continuously support the Apache Beam Project. In addition, I am very grateful for supporting the development of a diverse community, creating the mechanisms by which everybody can share knowledge and expertise.

Please join me in celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation and the contributions of thousands of contributors, who work every day to make the Apache community a success!

Monday, March 25, 2019

We are now accepting applications from university students who want to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Want to hone your software development skills while doing good for the open source community?

This year we are celebrating 15 years of introducing university students from around the world to open source software communities and our passionate community of mentors. For 3three months students code from the comfort of their homes and receive stipends based on thefor successful completion of their project milestones.

Past participants say the real-world experience that GSoC provides sharpened their technical skills, boosted their confidence, expanded their professional network and enhanced their resume.

Interested students can submit proposals on the program site between now and Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 18:00 UTC.

While many students began preparing in late February when we announced the 200+ participating open source organizations, it’s not too late for you to start! The first step is to browse the list of organizations and look for project ideas that appeal to you. Next, reach out to the organization to introduce yourself and determine if your skills and interests are a good fit. Since spots are limited, we recommend writing a strong proposal and submitting a draft early so you can get feedback from the organization and increase the odds of being selected.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Google Code-in (GCI), our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development, wrapped up last December with impressive numbers: 3,124 students from 77 countries completed an impressive 15,323 tasks!

These students spent 7 weeks working online with 27 open source organizations. They wrote code, wrote and edited documentation, designed UI elements and logos, and conducted research. Additionally, they developed videos to teach others about open source software, as well as found (and fixed!) hundreds of bugs.

Overview

We saw very large increases in the number of students from Austria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Taiwan

Student Age

Participating Schools

Students from 1,673 schools competed in this year’s contest. Many students learn about GCI from their friends or teachers and continue to spread the word to their classmates. This year the 5 schools with the most students completing tasks in the contest were:

Countries

This year we welcome winners and finalists from 77 countries, including 9 "first time" countries; Georgia, Macedonia, Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Israel, Luxembourg, Nepal and Pakistan.

The chart below displays the 10 countries with the most students completing at least 1 task.

What's Next

In June we will welcome all 54 grand prize winners to the San Francisco Bay Area for a fun-filled trip. The trip includes the opportunity for students to meet with one of the mentors they worked with during the contest. Students will also take part in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, tours of the Google campuses and a fun day exploring San Francisco.

We are thrilled that Google Code-in was so popular this year. We hope to continue to grow and expand this contest in the future to introduce even more teenagers to the exciting world of open source software.

Thank you again to the people who make this program possible: the 789 mentors from 57 countries that guided students through the program and welcomed them into their open source communities.

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

At Google, we are committed to accessibility and are constantly looking for ways to improve our development process to discover, debug and fix accessibility issues. Today we are excited to announce a new open source project: Accessibility Scanner for iOS (or GSCXScanner as we lovingly call it). This is a developer tool that can assist in locating and fixing accessibility issues while an app is being developed.

App development can be a time consuming process, especially when it involves human testers. Sometimes, as in the case with accessibility testing, they are necessary. A developer can write automated tests to perform some accessibility checks, but GSCXScanner takes this one step further. When a new feature is being developed, often there are several iterations of code changes, building, launching and trying out the new feature. It is faster and easier to fix accessibility issues with the feature if they can be detected during this phase when the developer is working with the new feature.

GSCXScanner lives in your app process and can perform accessibility checks on the UI currently on the screen simply with the touch of a button. The scanner’s UI which is overlaid on the app can be moved around so you can use your app normally and trigger a scan only when you need it. Also, it uses GTXiLib, a library of iOS accessibility checks to scan your app, and you can author your own GTX checks and have them run along with scanner’s default checks.

Using the scanner does not eliminate the need for manual testing or automated tests, these are must haves for delivering quality products. But GCSXScanner can speed up the development process by showing issues in app during development.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

We're excited to announce that Google is a founding member of the newly formed Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Continuous delivery (CD) is a critical part of modern software development and DevOps practices, and we're excited to collaborate in a vendor-neutral foundation with other industry leaders.

We're also thrilled to announce the contribution of two projects as part of our membership: Tekton, and in collaboration with Netflix, Spinnaker. These donations will enter alongside Jenkins and Jenkins X, providing an exciting portfolio of projects for the CDF to expand upon.

Continuous Delivery Foundation

Currently, the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool landscape is highly fragmented. As companies migrate to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure, tooling decisions become increasingly complicated and difficult. DevOps practitioners constantly seek guidance on software delivery best practices and how to secure their software supply chains but gathering this information can be difficult. Enter the CDF.

The CDF is about more than just code. Modern application development brings new challenges around security and compliance. This foundation will work to define the practices and guidelines that, together with tooling, will help application developers everywhere deliver better and more secure software at speed.

At a foundation level, the CDF will help make CI/CD tooling easier. And at a project level, Tekton helps address complexity problems at their core. We will team up with the open source community and industry leaders to design and build the critical pieces common to CI/CD systems.

Tekton

Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems. It provides a flexible, extensible workflow that accommodates deployment to Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, mobile or even emerging use cases.

The project’s goal is to provide industry specifications for pipelines, workflows, source code access and other primitives. It modernizes the continuous delivery control plane by leveraging all of the built-in scaling, reliability, and extensibility advantages of Kubernetes, and moves software deployment logic there. Tekton was initially built as a part of Knative, but given its stand-alone power, and ability to deploy to a variety of targets, we’ve decided to separate its functionality out into a new project.

Today, Tekton includes primitives for pipeline definition, source code access, artifact management, and test execution. The project roadmap includes adding support for results and event triggering in the coming months. We also plan to work with CI/CD vendors to build out an ecosystem of components that will allow you to use Tekton with existing tools like Jenkins X, Knative and others.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform originally created by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google. It is typically used in organizations at scale, where DevOps teams support multiple development teams, and has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams and in millions of deployments.

Spinnaker is a multi-component system that conceptually aligns with Tekton, and that includes many features important to making continuous delivery reliable, including support for advanced deployment strategies, and Kayenta, an open source canary analysis service.

Given Google’s significant contributions to both Tekton and Spinnaker, we’re very pleased to see them become part of the same foundation. Spinnaker’s large user community has a great deal of experience in the continuous delivery domain, and joining the CDF provides a great opportunity to share that expertise with the broader community.

Next Steps

If you'd like to participate in the future of Tekton, Spinnaker, or the CDF, please join us in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20th at the Continuous Delivery Summit ahead of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, as there will be many opportunities to get involved and become a part of the community.

We look forward to working with the continuous delivery community on shaping the next wave of CI/CD innovations, alignments, and improvements, no matter where your applications are delivered to.

Monday, March 11, 2019

Google Open Source is delighted to announce Season of Docs, a new program which fosters the open source contributions of technical writers.

Season of Docs brings technical writers and open source projects together for a few months to work on open source documentation. 2019 is the first time we’re running this exciting new program.

Join us in making a substantive contribution to open source software development around the world.

Fostering collaboration between open source projects and technical writers

The Open Source Survey showed that documentation is highly valued in open source communities, yet there’s little good documentation out there. Why? Because creating documentation is hard. But...

There are people who know how to do docs well. Technical writers know how to structure a documentation site so that people can find and understand the content. They know how to write docs that fit the needs of their audience. Technical writers can also help optimize a community’s processes for open source contribution and on-boarding new contributors.

During Season of Docs, technical writers will spend a few months working closely with open source communities. Each writer works with their chosen open source project. The writers bring their expertise to the projects’ documentation while at the same time learning about open source and new technologies.

Mentors from participating open source organizations share knowledge of their communities’ processes and tools. Together the technical writers and mentors build a new doc set, improve the structure of the existing docs, develop a much-needed tutorial, or improve contribution processes and guides. See more ideas for technical writing projects.

By working together in Season of Docs we raise awareness of open source, of docs, and of technical writing.

How does it work?

April 2-23: Open source organizations apply to take part in Season of Docs

April 30: Google publishes the list of accepted mentoring organizations, along with their ideas for documentation projects

April 30 - June 28: Technical writers choose the project they’d like to work on and submit their proposals to Season of Docs

July 30: Google announces the accepted technical writer projects

August 1 - September 1: Community bonding: Technical writers get to know mentors and the open source community, and refine their projects in collaboration with their mentors

September 2 - November 29: Technical writers work with open source mentors on the accepted projects, and submit their work at the end of the period

December 10: Google publishes the list of successfully-completed projects.

See the timeline for details, including the provision for projects that run longer than three months.

Join us

Explore the Season of Docs website at g.co/seasonofdocs to learn more about participating in the program. Use our logo and other promotional resources to spread the word. Examine the timeline, check out the FAQ, and get ready to apply!